What is the most exciting thing you’ve ever built? *
Hack the North is all about dreaming and building BIG! We’re looking for hackers who are enthusiastic and proud of their work, so what’s the coolest thing you’ve ever accomplished? If you have a notable technical project that comes to mind, go for that! If not, any other remarkable passion or initiative you’ve pursued will work! We’d love to hear about the whole journey - what did you build, why did you build it, and how does it reflect who you are as a builder?
It’s January 14th, 2025. I’m doomscrolling reddit and come across a post on r/selfhosted about OpenAI scraping the hell out of someone’s website. Someone suggests returning garbage data to the scrapers. I reply, “hey, sounds like a cool idea, any interest for a Caddy plugin for this?” I get some positive feedback and a few hours later I make the first commit. A few days later I make my own post. It gets 300+ upvotes and a whole lot of feedback which I quickly implement.
A month later, everything’s great. My project caddy-defender has grown to 300 GitHub stars and one of my contributors was a principal engineer at Cisco, which was wild. But there was a critical flaw. The core matching algorithm operated on publicly disclosed CIDR ranges - basically trying to block known IP addresses these companies use. Problem is, it’s impossible to match against botnets that some companies employ. You can’t block what you can’t see coming.
That’s when I found this little project called Anubis. It didn’t even have its own GitHub repo at the time, but the approach was genius. Instead of playing whack-a-mole with IP addresses, it just gave everyone a cryptographic challenge to solve. Real browsers solve it instantly and move on. Bots trying to scrape at scale? They burn through compute costs and give up.
I started contributing immediately. What started as weekend commits turned into co-maintaining one of the fastest-growing open source security projects.
Now it’s sitting at nearly 10k stars and being used by the United Nations, GNOME, Arch Linux, The Linux Kernel, Duke, UCLA, Columbia as well as FFmpeg, and hundreds of other sites that just want to exist without getting demolished by AI scrapers. Hell, Duke wrote a paper about it!
What gets me is that we’re actually protecting the weird, interesting parts of the internet. Random bloggers, niche forums, indie developers - people who can’t afford or can’t use enterprise solutions but deserve to have their content stay online. Every deployment is a small victory for the open web.
The fact that it started from someone just trying to protect their Git server and grew into this movement? That's the kind of thing that makes you want to keep building cool shit. It's not just code - it's digital infrastructure for the little guy, built by people who give a damn about keeping the internet weird and wonderful.